On The Go: How to Make a Mobile Friendly Website

How important do you take your business’s online presence? Is your page optimized? Are your social accounts updated?

How about your site’s mobile accessibility? Having a great website is important, but if it’s not optimized for mobile users it’s not as valuable as it could be.

2016 saw the use of mobile devices surpass traditional desktop computers for the first time. Smartphones and tablets have become the go-to means for most people looking for information online.

Keep reading to learn how to make a mobile-friendly website.

Assess Your Current Mobile-Friendliness

You can make your site responsive on mobile devices a few different ways. It can take anything from a few tweaks of your current layout to a complete overhaul.

Before you decide your approach, run an assessment tool. Google offers a free Mobile-Friendly Test that will diagnosis your business page. It’ll let you know if your current site passes or, if not, what issues you need to address.

Once you have this information you can make your plan.

Choose Your Solution

What’s the right approach to making your site responsive? That depends on a few factors. First of all, you need to understand the purpose of your site. Is it a platform for conducting sales and providing services? That will have different demands than an information-based site.

Modifying an existing site makes sense when you need a few changes and the site’s purpose is more static. Sometimes, cleaning up the layout and fixing the formatting is all that’s needed to optimize it.

Building a mobile-specific site has become a popular practice. This allows for the original page to offer its full experience on computers while providing a streamlined version for mobile use.

Finally, if your site needs to be user-intensive, a mobile app may be the best approach. An app breaks free from the confines of a webpage and offers a platform that meets your users’ exact needs.

Budget and time will always influence your choice. However, let your needs determine your solution. The most important thing is meeting your customers’ needs.

Development

Now that you’ve established your plan, you need to get the actual site built. How you do that presents a whole new challenge.

Optimizing an existing site can sometimes be done with just some technical know-how. Using a content management system like WordPress can be of assistance here. Its platform automatically attempts to optimize content for mobile.

The skills required to build a mobile site or app increase significantly. There are many tools available if this is the route you choose. Keep in mind that, unless you’re already skilled in this area, what you might save in money, you’ll lose in time and resources.

Contracting the work to a professional can be expensive. However, it offers peace of mind that the work will get done right and on time. With technical optimization being an important part of search engine optimization, it might save you from committing some SEO mistakes.

How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Site

Being online means meeting your audience where they are. Your customers are looking for you on their phones and tablets. That’s why you need to know how to make a mobile-friendly site.